Review: WebEx and GoToMeeting meet their match

Adobe Connect and Zoom lead six mostly stellar Web conferencing services for desktops and mobile devices

Thomas Friedman famously announced that the world is flat in his 2005 book of that name; he was writing about globalization. In Friedman's view, VoIP, file sharing, and wireless were the "steroids" that have accelerated the flattening of global commerce. Today I'd add video over Internet, which has become more and more prevalent as bandwidth has improved.

The two leaders in business Web conferencing are Cisco WebEx and Citrix GoToMeeting. Other products in the field include Adobe Connect, Drum ShareAnywhere, Join.me, and Zoom. Of course, I’m leaving a few out, in at least one case as a kindness to the vendor. (They hate it when I leave them out; they really hate it when I tear their product to shreds.)

Some businesses use consumer products for voice and video over the Internet. Microsoft Skype, Google Hangouts, and Google Voice (no video) are three I've used extensively. While these can be useful, they don’t quite meet the criteria for business-grade Web conferencing products.

These higher-end products are expected to simultaneously display desktop shares, video, and audio. They have high reliability and quality. They integrate with common desktop software, and they work with mobile devices. They are also expected to handle large conference broadcasts, either in the base service or as a separate product.

As we will see, there is a bit of variation among the business-grade products in all of these areas, as well as some differences in their bundling strategies and their behavior in restricted-bandwidth situations. There is also variation in the geographic coverage of vendors’ telephone points of presence (that is, global call-in numbers), although telephony infrastructure is becoming less important as more users call in from their computers (using microphones and speakers) or mobile devices.

Web conferencing: What can go wrong?

Web conference calls are notoriously prone to problems. Some people can’t get on the call at all, while others can hear audio but not see video, and still others can hear and see but can’t be heard or seen, though they have microphones and video cameras. Some people can only get on the call using a telephone; others can only get on using their computers. Sometimes the telephone bridge and the computer audio don’t mix properly. Sometimes people generate feedback or echoes whenever their microphones are on; sometimes barking dogs or meowing cats interrupt the meeting. I won’t even mention the people who call in on cellphones from their cars while driving or those who use substandard speakerphones.

Sometimes people who think they are muted are not, and they inadvertently transmit inappropriate sounds to horrified listeners, or they transmit information that was supposed to be secret to delighted listeners. (I know of one case where moans and shrieks during a conference call got an unmarried couple in a remote office fired, and another case where one side’s position in a price negotiation for a large contract was given to the other side.) But I digress.

The consumer service Skype can sometimes do a great job of both audio and video, but its quality varies from day to day and even over the course of a call, often to the point where it’s unusable. One some days, you can set a clock by how long Skype takes to flake out: “It’s pushing 20 minutes, so expect me to restart the call if it dies.”

Even the most expensive business-class services with the best supporting infrastructure can’t overcome local network problems. On the other hand, vendors sometimes try to blame user’s perfectly adequate local Wi-Fi for bandwidth or latency issues that reside in the vendors’ own network infrastructure.